SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 213 



open as early as the 12th of January, in sunny 

 weather. But they grow entirely without 

 leaves, and are produced at the expense o£ the 

 material laid up in the underground stem hy 

 last season's foliage. They blossom, are 

 fertilised, set their seeds, turn into heads of 

 white feathery down, and produce ripe fruits 

 which blow away and get dispersed, all before 

 the leaves begin to appear at all above the soil. 

 Thus you never can see the foliage and flowers 

 together ; it is only by close observation that 

 you can discover for yourself the connection 

 between the heads of yellow flowers which come 

 up in early spring, and the groups of large 

 angular woolly leaves which follow them in the 

 same spots much later in the season. 



The life-history of the coltsfoot introduces us 

 also to another conception which we must clearly 

 understand if we wish to know anything about 

 many plant biographies. I have said already 

 that parts of one and the same coltsfoot plant 

 might easily be mistaken for separate indi- 

 viduals ; and, indeed, if the stem gets severed, 

 particular groups of leaves may live on as such, 

 in two or more distinct portions. This leads us 

 on to the consideration of a great group of 

 plants like the common wild strawberry, in 

 which a regular system of subdivision exists, 

 and in which new plants are habitually pro- 

 duced by offsets or runners, as well as by seed- 

 lings. Such a method of increase is to some 

 extent a survival into higher types of the primi- 

 tive mode of reproduction by subdivision. 



A strawberry plant grows in the first instance 



